


Catalog of Things Omitted

by samarqand



Category: Marvel 616, Punisher
Genre: M/M, Masturbation, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One ordinary night's navel-gazing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catalog of Things Omitted

It is a chilly spring night, and after dousing Henry in his blood, Frank again turns out into the night.

Urgency never draws questions from Henry. He makes quick work of the puncture wounds once the throbbing tunnel vision with its nausea had ebbed.

A bat with nails -- quaint, but timeless. It got the job done, got the juices flowing. And Frank would be down, were he not already swifting out the door like he’s on someone else's deadline.

“'Kay, then!" Henry yells after him. "Go team. You know where to find me.”

Alone but not lonely. That’s what the old ladies say, long after their husbands passed on and they found happiness in gardening, or sudoku. Henry isn’t lonely; he has, after all, the expectation of Frank in real time on his screens -- any time now, he says in the peaceful interims. Any time. 

At most, he gets apprehensive when he has nothing, no one to catch on his monitors. It's then he becomes most identifiable as the boy he'd once been, with his self-imposed solitary confinement.

Maybe he dove into Frank’s mire because he was tired of being that kind of alone. He’d had enough remote lessons of loss, waiting out his father’s horror shows sick and shy with fear, or searching for the solution to his mother’s wounded corners, where she would vanish before he discovered how to coax her forward. 

Henry wanted, maybe, to experience a chase where he was chasing alongside.

He has never known anyone in all his life to give devotion as Frank Castle does. 

He doesn’t know what to say about it, he feels he wants to drink it in but he doesn't know what he means when he feels it.

Sometimes he leaves post-it notes on Frank’s cooling plates of dinner, maybe to-do lists or doodles of the day’s more interesting tidbits he’d caught on CCTVs, traffic feeds -- escaping balloon bouquets; fantastic bicycle collisions. Sometimes he grinds himself down into his work, into the exhausted torn roots of murder and its machinations, and Frank admits in plain terms that Henry’s results are useful, and it makes the English language beautiful to Henry.

Sometimes Frank actually touches the quinoa Henry makes him. Henry smiles, sometimes.

Frank remembers what a smile means. Doesn’t he?

 

+

 

Frank tells Henry to only listen for his word at the end of the night. 

Fashion a listening post here in the safehouse and tap into every conversation Frank has with every name on tonight’s blacklist. Scour the data for keywords.

What Henry knows of Frank is sightless.

The mere sound he imbibes is large and lingering, his brain begging hallucinations if only to give a face to all that terror on the airwaves. Sputter of viscerals leaking; raw screams of terror; piteous stammering under duress.

This is three-fourths of the night under their belts, worked over. This is useful, Henry tells himself, checking another name off on his steno pad. 

“Well done, you,” Henry says into his mic, they reach the last name and the scuffles quiet down. “Coming home anytime before sunrise?”

“Keep your channels open. Scout our hyperlocal sources.”

“Always and forever. Listening to Norman Osborn engineer society one media event at a time? Pure gold,” Henry mutters. 

Frank doesn’t care to hear it. 

“So,” Henry continues, “are we gonna stay audio-only?”

“Your call,” says Frank, burst of static.

Frank doesn’t care to hear it. But he could appreciate Henry wanting to speak it, couldn’t he?

“I know what’s going on,” Henry presses. “You’re giving me an easy out.”

Frank gives him nothing now. 

Henry imagines him wandering toward Alphabet City, slower with the urgency dissipated for tonight; he curves down the next block, and makes a half circle before returning upstreet again; it’s utterly uncharacteristic for the Punisher were this not New York City, where every spare moment is an opportunity to map every uncharted corner and tuck it down somewhere safe, where the memory of it would keep amid their spiraling chaos. 

That’s Frank Castle. He does devotion like no one else.

“My stomach doesn’t listen to my head,” Henry explains. 

He stares up at a signed poster, old anarcho-punk group long gone their separate ways. He thinks he must be happier than any face found on these walls, and he finds he must try to let it be known. 

“Frank, I feel like shit sometimes. Sure. Even last time I got my blood drawn, I fainted when I saw it filling up a vial.” He clears his throat. "It's a kind of leftover aversion to life with -- you know, how my body remembers my old life now that I don't have to live it. I'm not making excuses, I'm. Here you can't help me. So don't worry about it. I’m not -- biologically opposed to your modus operandi, or gonna crack one day and tie-dye your uniform. Scout’s honor. It’s nothing against you.”

“Your business,” Frank answers him.

“It was,” Henry pauses, “until you made it an issue tonight.”

“It’s a non-issue,” Frank corrects him. “You’re distracting yourself.” 

“No, hold up, I’m not distracted,” Henry corrects him, whipping around defiantly to watch the monitors -- all the other people in all the city, except Frank. “This is a footnote, dammit! I’m doing the responsible thing. I’m clearing the air. I’m not seeking out an easier world.” 

He sits up. Then he remembers he has nothing but this inert system of sounds to work with now that he's a listening post, and slumps back in his chair. “You’ve got me, and I want to be sure you know that.”

We’re safer when we’re closer. He almost says this, sounding like high school again and its compulsive desperation.

But then: maybe only one of us is.

“Stand by,” Frank reports. 

“Wilco,” Henry mutters.

Maybe there is something to be read in the line of Frank’s mouth now, or later in the pages of the war journal he gives his attention when the minutes will allow it. Henry will never know this, but he likes to imagine it when he listens through sleep to Frank. He has only ever known the sound of the ballpoint pen rolling cursive onto page after page, an argot in a scratching pen’s voice.

 

+

 

They say time is more meaningful than touch. 

Henry retells himself the same story, that there is meaning in “every day.” 

Every day wake up the same, every day struggle, every day endure, every day progress, every day be with purpose, every day try to touch.

Pretend that Frank hasn’t realized yet that Henry’s been with him all along, because accepting the truth such a shock of disappointment, like arctic water.

They say don’t waste your time.

But Henry is only nineteen and time is his to waste.

Or maybe he’ll be dead tomorrow, and the time is borrowed anyway.

His cot sits parallel to Frank’s, inviting in the worn hours between Frank’s usual requests for a sitrep or Frank’s early-morning return to shower and sleep. Henry has time to himself, to kick back the unmade covers and fight to sleep as solidly as Frank seems to.

Frank thinks with his hands. He carves messages into skin, blade succinct and swift like shorthand. 

Or he writes in his pristine journal. 

Frank thinks, and Henry doesn’t understand what he thinks, because he cannot bear to watch Frank’s fingers crush or tear or grip from anything but periphery. And then, what happens when the night wears past and Frank turns slower and more considerate? There’s a pen in Frank’s hand, but he couldn’t ask what Frank allows himself to write. Journal #97, Journal #105. 

How does he do devotion?

Henry can hear it. Henry hears everything; he learned early on to shut up and bravely listen for what he never wanted to know. Now it’s the only way he understands Frank.

Listening. And sometimes, just sometimes, touch.

The way their little table rattles as Frank jots a couple names down on their map, unsteadying Henry’s resuscitation of a discarded two-way radio, police-grade. The leg of the table shuddering against Henry’s knee when Frank erases outdated intel and swipes away the shavings. 

Doing Frank’s laundry, picking at his clothes and knowing where they’ve been. Folding them like his mother never taught him, and leaving them by Frank’s cot. 

The way proximity has its appropriate moments, and when it is warranted and Frank leans close, neither move or say a word, because this is the precarious level their understanding of each other has reached. 

The space their bodies share. Their bodies’ undeniable presence and how close, how unbearably close they’ve become.

It’s new. It’s not something you’re meant to think about. It’s not something Frank thinks about. 

Some element of their relationship will transform again eventually, as these things do, another turning of a corner, and Frank could abandon Henry, fed up with his childish shit. And Frank’s whereabouts will end up an unsurprising mystery and that will be the end of that.

Or.

Henry wakes up to a silent safehouse after a nap. He traces the geography of his cot, the wrinkles and coarse edges of sheets. He touches himself, training himself on optimism.

Or maybe they’ll both end up bewildered.

He’s going to come hard with two fingers inside himself, rocking up in awkward rhythm against his hand until he turns himself into a shaking mess. 

He imagines rough fingers pulling response from him. He imagines warmth where he accepts that it may not exist.

He thinks of the dip and jut of Frank’s clavicles, knows how uncompromising they would feel against him, and how they would unanchor him, send him out to sea. 

How steeled Frank would be, seeking an efficient end in the midst of the inexorable whirlwind they’ve resided in together, so long now, so long --

How he’d pin Henry, hands like shackles on Henry’s wrists but the floor beneath Henry’s head like sand, uncertain and as unsteady as breathing. 

How he’d fuck Henry artlessly, like everything else he did, but not violently -- what is the word for it? Is there a word that exists for it? Would he even give enough of a shit to want to describe it to himself? 

He curls his fingers inside himself, thinking of Frank’s heaviness, and whimpers.

The geography of a remote heart. 

Palm to palm -- and rudimentary palmistry Henry could conduct if he weren’t half-gone with sensation.

Jutting angles of -- all those concealed weapons. He’d forgotten. Doomsday devices strapped to thighs, cartridges and canisters digging into Henry’s skin when he surges up against Frank to demand more skin --

Henry drags his hips against his sheets before curling in on himself with agonized gratification. He bites his lip and makes a sound that dies quickly in his throat. 

He coasts along the pleasure, feeling susceptible and then, when pleasure drifts on past, vulnerable.

“Dammit,” Henry croaks, muffled against the cot. He shivers, jaw slack.

Frank has ideas about Henry’s wants. He knows some things, but there are things he’s told Henry he doesn’t want to know. 

There are so many things Henry could tell Frank. He always feels ready to give up. But then there he is again, chasing.

Henry lazily swoons to his feet, disheveled and exhausted, and pads over to the bathroom door. 

He opens it to find Frank there, stitching a curved laceration that bows down his forearm. He’s dripping in blood. 

The shower is dripping in blood and water. The wall is spattered in diluted blood, fresh and runny. The sight of so much red, one could never be rid of it.

Henry stares. His expression blank and his face gone pale or blushing, either option a condemnation. Nausea licks against raging shame.

“Nice paintjob,” he mumbles. “Really Jackson Pollock of you.”

“Finishing up here,” Frank says.

Henry bows his head and dips around to wash his hands viciously in the red-dotted sink. 

He gives himself a moment to squeeze his eyes shut and hide them in the crook of his arm.

Then, fingertips still dripping, he sits beside Frank on the lip of the bathtub. He takes Frank’s arm gingerly, so very mindful of their stained terrain and how Frank has brought the war to this place. He disinfects him, for want of becoming as remote as Frank is here, bare-chested and bruised and raw but supreme in his dispassion. 

He takes the thread and sews Frank shut.

When Frank gets impatient, Henry says, “Work with me,” and Frank does.

He keeps Frank's palm up. Long lifeline. But Frank has lived this truth already and there's no need to conjure up another word before bedtime.

There is no name for the vacancy their intimacy assumes, before the mission is moving again and they relate to one another in terse command and rebuke. 

There is no name for vacancy that is precious, absence of all but mutual wordlessness, and how it levels the walls until Frank leans his head back against the bathroom tiles and closes his eyes to wait for Henry to finish.

And look, Frank had come back for him when no one else in the world would. And while all the world elsewhere careens toward trouble, they get on okay. 

And they both know their mission is, at the end of things, useless. And they climb higher because they have to. And that when they both die, they will share failure.

Henry has so few things to live for. And this devotion to all that's left, that is something he shares with Frank.

He forgets what hands are there to do but work.


End file.
